One more point, I read another book that was written by an etymologist called The History of Pagan Europe (I think, I gave the book to my nephew, but I could borrow it back to get some honest citations). However, the coolest thesis presented in that book, to me, explained that according to the scholarship of the author that ancient Celt influenced the Indus Valley culture - suggesting the Celtic migrations didn't just go west of Switzerland (Celtic origin place), but they went east as well. The Hindu social caste system is almost a perfect match to the Celtic caste system with the Brahmans being equivalent to the Druids (2nd highest caste), and even showing a table of 50 or so words with Celtic on one side and Hindu on the other, and words like horse, stall, man, woman, slave were almost identical, often only different by one or two letters. The Indus Valley culture is considered one of the oldest, and if Celts influenced that culture, where talking immensely old attributions.
I'll try to borrow that book from my nephew to offer citations and post in this thread - might be next month though.
You may well be very familiar with the theory of Proto-Indo-European, but if you're not, I'll warn you to look it up before you go too far with this. Simply put, the word for "father" in Latin is "pater" and in German it's "vater," but that's no reason to conclude that one language is derived from the other (in either direction). Given the wealth of historical data we have, it's clear that instead both are derived from a common root.
In fact, languages throughout Europe, parts of Asia, & India (including Sanskrit & Hindustani) have some vocabulary and more importantly (I say, but then I would) grammatical elements in common -- all developed in one big, crazy, sprawling family from the completely fictional language they call Proto-Indo-European. (Again, there are not and could not be any historical records recording such a language.) A very few European languages like Basque are hold-outs, and utterly unrelated to everybody else. Have I mentioned that my linguistic studies most distinctly did not involve philology? Well, I've now told you what I know about PIE.
Except that I just wiki'ed it, and found out that the origin point is supposed to be in the Ukraine. Of course, I have seen a theory (but sadly, I don't remember where) that the Celts originated along the Danube River. Which tantalizingly enough has its mouth on the border with the Ukraine...
...I would love to look up at some point the context for the OED's first citation, from sometime before 1327, "Sathanas..Seyde on is sawe Gobelyn made is gerner Of gromene mawe." (Which is when I realize my Middle English is disgracefully rusty.)
But this bit from an English version of Melusine from around 1500 sounds much nicer, "Many manyeres of thinges, the whiche somme called Gobelyns, the other ffayrees, and the other ‘bonnes dames’ or good ladyes."
Ohhhh, you do have access. Be sure to give thanks! (I assume it's due to working or studying in academia.) And thank-you for the quote.
So the OED is positing a demonic meaning, but to the goblin half. Interesting... Not knowing anything about French folklore, I think I'll bow out of a fight on this one. Although I couldn't help but notice that the etymology only refers to "spirits," and the second quote seems to refer to fairies rather than devils. Of course, the first one definitely names Satan. <gulp> This is where I have to admit that even though I majored in English at a very good college, I'm not precisely "rusty" at Middle English -- I never learned it in the first place. Any help you can give me in understanding the quote would be appreciated!
And yes, would people stop calling these creatures ugly or grotesque? They're... appearance-challenged! They have a unique take on personal style! Their mothers think they're beauti... maybe not. :)
In any case, whatever Beowulf mentioned as the offspring of Cain, it was not...
I do indeed have access to the OED as a student through my college, thanks be to the Muses! And the good people at Archive.org, bless them, have put up the edition the OED quoted, which helpfully provides a translation (here). The context is a satire on uppity servants in the inflated households of the aristos of the day, especially their grooms, it seems. In the stanza this particular line comes from, the poet introduces the idea that they're gluttons and drunkards too. So "gromene" is possessive, and not related to "gromelich" (terrible, wrathful), which was my first guess. The line goes, loosely, "Satan, their father, said, like he always did, 'Goblin got his feeding [lit., garner, storehouse] from the grooms' maw!'"
So by the 14th c., demonic "goblins" were naturalized in English invective, at least. Makes sense given the apparent line of transmission from French.
I'm no etymologist, though I certainly appreciate language origins - I'm more interested in how ancient peoples think. Though a seemingly impossible task, I have a talent of seeing a big picture with a few good clues, which I use to drive my maps, games and imagination. I know of the proto Indo European language, though I don't plan to delve too deeply. I read a book that offered an intriguing concept in a subject I don't generally pursue.
While I use lots of Japanese vocabulary in Kaidan for authenticity, I'm generally not a big language guy kind of GM/world builder, place names yes, but not entire languages, generally.
My husband was off playing a boardgame yesterday. I didn't join in because... reasons. I'm pleased to say that instead I had a very enjoyable day reading & posting linguistics-related material on this thread. Thank you all!
However, when Debnor got home, I showed him much of the discussion, and he had his own reaction to Briggs's theory re: Brownies.
(...) the English brownie were a diminuitive laborer that would work your fields in exchange for cream and sweet cake. As long as payment is only with the agreed upon food arrangement, they would agree to work the fields, however, as soon as you try to pay them in coin, instead of food - brownies run off never to work for the farmer again.
According to Briggs originates from the idea that brownies weren't originally fairies, rather remnants of a conquered predecessor human culture, perhaps Bronze Age people usurped by Iron Age cultures (like the Tuatha de Danaan usurping the Firbolgs of ancient Ireland). As an earlier human culture, they were pushed out of the habitable areas and forced into hiding in the forests and high country of the hinterland. Now starving, they quietly approach one of the farmers of the new culture and offering their labor in exchange for quality food. Accepting payment in gold or silver, is considered entering into a contract and buying into the foreign invader culture's economy, which is considered anathema to the conquered peoples. Of course as time goes by, and the conquered peoples die out or assimilate with the new culture and are mostly forgotten, the stories convert into fairy tales, and the conquered into fairy beings.
Debnor saw this and said, "Sure, Picts."
OK, the tall & blond Celts [edited] conquered the short & dark-haired Picts of Scotland, so perhaps it's significant that the Scottish Anglo-Celts refer to "brownies," while the English Anglo-Saxons refer to "hobs."
Certainly, there is something appealing about the notion of a proud but still subjugated people who will not work for the conquerer's money or wear the conquerer's clothing, who believe that to do either is to accept their superiority. Who will not be servants forced to work at their conquerers' direction. But who voluntarily work hard -- at night when no one will tell them to do so -- and take food that "happens" to be left out. Sure, they would at dawn retreat to the wilds, or even come to live in an attic room carefully left bare.
The thing is, conquerers who believed in household gods who looked after each house, who wouldn't be seen but who helpfully did the household's work at night, would surely be more likely to accept such an arrangement than others, don't you think?
The conceptual root of the brownie fairy isn't necessarily an either/or matter.
~~~
As a side-note, the notion I read somewhere that the Celts of Britain originated along the Danube had some other support, as I recall, but was significantly based on the name, "Tuatha de Danaan." According to my new good friend, the On-Line Etymology Dictionary, that name means People of Danu, mother of the gods. But is the name for the mother of the gods related to that of the great Danube river? One could certainly suppose that people who lived along it would see it as a major mothering influence. And...
Danube major river of Europe (German Donau, Hungarian Duna, Russian Dunaj), from Latin Danuvius, from Celtic *danu(w)-yo-, from PIE *danu- "river" (compare Don, Dnieper, Dniester).
There we might have evidence that the Celts are the people who mothered [edit: gave birth to] so many languages. I just wish I remembered who had made this argument.
Picts are Ugric peoples and not Celts at all - a completely different ethnic group. Though certainly the conquered people theory could be referring to Ugric Picts.
And yes, Tuatha de Danaan does mean "people of Danu" (a goddess), though I cannot confirm, nor have read confirmation that Danu refers to Danube - though that seems perfectly reasonable.
The Iron Age Celts of the Tuatha de Danaan arrived in Ireland from Spain, though they previously migrated to Spain from the Danube area, as the origins of all Celts.
Among faerie origins are most were location spirits (river spirits, mountain spirits, forest spirits) or essentially deities of ancient times still remembered, though over time are no longer consider gods but have diminished into faeries instead. Some faerie origins are remembered humans - kings, other royalty who also degenerated into ghosts then to faeries as time passed. The brownie theory as a conquered people, is one more different origin. I believe all these origins are true.
Another related concept is that the further back in time you look faeries seem to be taller beings, even taller than humans, but as time progressed forward, and memories have faded they become smaller, until you reach the Victorian Age with Tinkerbell sized faeries, which in older times never existed. As if the loss in memory and belief forced faeries to shrink in size (not literally) but in the minds of it's believers.
@Azothath - certainly brains don't work differently, but how one perceives the world changes, which is what I mean in change of thinking. For example only going to the 19th century, in Robinson Caruso, for example, the emphasis to thanking God for everything is superfluous in that book, because in the minds of most Christianity was at the heart of everything. Not that there aren't Christians now, but the emphasis on God is not ever present in what is written. This is a difference in one's perception of the world, as "thinking" changed in that respect. In Celtic times how one perceived the world was immensely different than how we think to today. Again these changes in thinking has nothing to do with how the brain work, rather how people perceive the world around them - that changes constantly from age to age. And that is what I find interesting.
When I created Kaidan, I tried to both include how my mother and Japanese relatives think about their world now and how they perceive their feudal period, which is different than how Westerners perceive feudal Japan. I put the Japanese difference in perception into the way I developed the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG). For example from a Westerners point of view the kappa (a turtle like amphibious humanoid) to most Westerners the concept is just completely odd, whereas to the Japanese kappa are scary beings. I tried to put that point of view in my description of kappa, so readers could better appreciate kappa from that point of view. This is what I mean by different thinking.
Going back to the Japanese thread-within-a-thread, does Kaidan have Japanese dragons? Those are my main passion right now. I've been trying to come up with a set for Minkai, since I hate the Imperial Dragons that Paizo published.
Do any of your products (or any others that you know of) do a decent job with ninja? The Paizo class looks very odd to me. You've mentioned that some people in authority were granted the right to use Katanas (presumably, only with "martial weapon proficiency" -- that is, two-handed), but why would ninjas train with them? Weren't they peasants in origin? I have to wonder what else besides weapon proficiencies are off-kilter. {I moved and edited this paragraph after posting.}
Also, someone recommended some 3rd-party sourcebooks for me, and I'm curious if you're familiar with them. If so, what do you think of them?
>> Dragon Tiger Ox: Wuxia/Wushu Sourcebook
>> Heroes of the East (PFRPG) -- a series
While I'm putting together a Christmas wish-list, do you have a date yet on the Kaidan Gamemaster's Guide? How about a price? (I'm willing to accept coupons under the tree. LOL) And can you give me a rough outline of the contents? I'm hoping it will contain suggestions for how to play NPCs and a comprehensive bestiary -- things I could port into Golarion's Minkai.
Finally, Way of the Samurai (PFRPG) and Haiku of Horror: Autumn Moon Bath House (PFRPG) are already on my wishlist! (Although I have to hope the first fits in with where Jade Regent is, historically. I'm very confused on Japanese history, and where Shoguns fit vs. an Empire.) Thank you for publishing these!
Japanese Dragons do exist in Kaidan, but have not been published yet. I tried to include a Kaidan Bestiary as part of the original Kickstarter to fund the GM's guide but we didn't collect enough patrons to fund a bestiary. Hopefully we can get a Bestiary out next as either its own Kickstarter, or just doing so on the side.
Unfortunately, right now, all the new monsters can be found in the full modules: The Gift, Dim Spirit, Dark Path; the one shots: Tolling of Tears, Frozen Wind, Up from Darkness; in the supplements: In the Company of Kappa, In the Company of Tengu, In the Company of Henge; #30 Haunts for Kaidan, and Haiku of Horror. The monsters currently aren't in one document.
As an option, except for Haiku of Horror, all other supplements and modules can be purchased as a reduced price bundle from DTRPG - Here for $29.99 (Haiku of Horror was released after the bundle was created and for whatever reason hasn't been placed in the bundle yet).
Feudal Japan and Kaidan feature both the Empire and Shogunate. While the Imperial court does create laws for the empire, the emperor is still largely a figurehead, whereas the Office of the Shogunate is the actual secular/military government.
The PDF download of the GM's guide is $19.99, and the printed book is $29.99 (I believe)
GM's Guide to Kaidan outline:
History, Races, Religion, Tenmei (reincarnation cycle), Gazetteer, Life in Kaidan, Death in Kaidan, Adventuring in Kaidan, Magic in Kaidan, Appendix 1 - Calendar, Appendix 2 - Feats, Appendix 3 - Shikigami, Appendix 4 - Inspiration, Appendix 5 - Glossary.
As far as release dates go, the downloadable PDF is now available to Kickstarter backers, with the print just now going to print proof, and with the holiday season at hand, I don't know if it will be released by December (hopefully yes) otherwise expect release in January.
I like some of Legendary Games Oriental Stuff, but have not looked at those other 3PP products you've mentioned, so I have no opinion on them.
Way of the Samurai (PFRPG) should fit perfectly fine in Minkai, there are 4 samurai archetypes, 1 ranger (yojimbo) archetype, 1 paladin (yamabushi) archetype, 1 wizard (onmyoji) archetype, and 2 prestige classes. Plus a bunch of other cool stuff including Creating a custom samurai clan rules (based off the PF city stat block).
We did plan to create a Way of the Shinobi, which would be our book on ninja. Unlike most other RPG guides regarding ninja, no ninja aren't peasants, originally they were samurai clans that specialized in stealth actions, however over time, they were kind of outside the caste system and became their own thing (and living in hiding), by the time of Ieyasu Tokugawa, they were considers outsiders, however before that time, they were specialized samurai clans.
I do indeed have access to the OED as a student through my college, thanks be to the Muses! And the good people at Archive.org, bless them, have put up the edition the OED quoted, which helpfully provides a translation (here). The context is a satire on uppity servants in the inflated households of the aristos of the day, especially their grooms, it seems. In the stanza this particular line comes from, the poet introduces the idea that they're gluttons and drunkards too. So "gromene" is possessive, and not related to "gromelich" (terrible, wrathful), which was my first guess. The line goes, loosely, "Satan, their father, said, like he always did, 'Goblin got his feeding [lit., garner, storehouse] from the grooms' maw!'"
So by the 14th c., demonic "goblins" were naturalized in English invective, at least. Makes sense given the apparent line of transmission from French.
Thank you very much for linking the full context. Now all we layfolk need is a translation of the translation! LOL Still, I think I have enough sense of it to trace the antecedent of "their." I don't see the quote as demonizing goblins as much as grooms. (Mind you, I'm decades past rigorous academic argument, and never read much in the way of Middle English literature, so you may be able to make mincemeat of what I have to say.)
When it says Satan is "their" sire, by all the rules I'm familiar with today you have to look backwards rather than forwards for who "they" are. And we find more references to the unhappy grooms: "rogues" -- although why the translation doesn't say "harlots" I don't know -- who are "horelings" (whores, I think) and who "haunt the play" (maybe play all the time?), and "gadlings" (I looked it up -- I never would have guessed comrades) who "are gluttons, and drink before it dawns" (finally, a clear bit!). In short, these rogues/harlots & their comrades (ie, the grooms) aren't just SoB's, no, they're Satan-spawn.
Now for the goblin part... "Gobelyn made is gerner Of gromene mawe."
The translation says, "Goblin made his garner of the grooms' maw."
You translated the translation (thank you!) as 'Goblin got his feeding [lit., garner, storehouse] from the grooms' maw!'
Still, may I timidly propose a different sense for it? "Goblins could eat their fill from the grooms' mouths!"
How'd you like an early Yule gift? In trying to figure out the stanza, I found the Middle English Dictionary, and got its listing of quotes for "gobelin." Well, you did say your Middle English was "rusty," right? Implying you'd like to polish it a little? I'm sure you'd love to find all the contexts for these and translate them all for us! What are you saying? NOOOOOO??? ;)
Conclusion: I think we can gather that goblins are popularly supposed to be voracious. Far, far more so than hobs, who limited themselves to whatever "gifts" might have been laid out. And I'm betting goblins didn't do any work, either. If a goblin moved into your home, you'd likely consider it "infested," not "blessed." But Satan-spawn or demonic? I don't see it from this quote. I suppose it doesn't really matter. As we've established, goblins arrived long after the not-yet-English had started to think of some creatures as devils or demons.
I'm just curious what sort of tales the Normans might have set in circulation about "goblins." It sounds like they weren't the sort the lady of the house might share with her native maid in order to "hobnob" (anachronistically) about their house spirit, even if that's what goblins had started out as in Normandy. (And of course, we don't know that they did.) There's a bit of evidence here that the tales may have been the sort that a rude young heir would share with the servants & stablehands in order to scare them. All Hallows' Eve tales, in other words.
And I can well imagine Anglo-Saxon peasants & servants telling each other stories of their own devising -- thinly disguised accounts of hungry Norman soldiers killing, reaving, & burning their way across England. Or maybe the peasants were already starting to use the Norman words: ravenously massacring, pillaging, & combusting. :)
In short, Pathfinder goblins are looking pretty good.
I have no intention of trying to mince your argument :) , but I think the author of this poem was a bit more distrustful of goblins then we might be. I mean, why is Satan talking about goblins when, presumably, there are any number of suitable evil spirits in Hell to compare to gluttonous villains? Then again, demons, including the Devil himself, aren’t all that scary here - the speaker is kind of counting on them to punish the wicked grooms, but apparently doesn’t think there’s anything risky about invoking (loosely speaking) demons rather than divine vengeance.
I’m thinking “demonic” in a cute way, kind of like the adorably inept Wormwood, and certainly not in a very strong sense. It might even be good odds that if we could ask the author, they might not personally think goblins are demons, but knew that the powers that be favoured goblins associated with demons. (Because the party line was that there were angels and fallen angels, and none of your non-canonical nature, household, and assorted other spirits, thank you very much :) , and so forth.)
As for your overall sense of the line, I guess that could be a generous reading of the line, but I think it’s likelier that the mood of the verb is just indicative, and so goblins actually do eat what the grooms chew up for them, so to speak. And that would put them on par with all sorts of minor medieval demons that thrive on petty human sins, like my favourite, Titivillus, who collects the mistakes scribes make and the names of people who gossip in church during the service. Here, gluttons would be feeding, by their excesses, goblin-demons. On the other hand, it would also be like the stories where fairies eat the “goodness” of food, leaving only the appearance of tasty things for mortals. I think we’re just seeing an easily separable veneer of Christian folklore over the common or garden (household?) goblin.
On a completely unrelated note, I think they translated “harlot” as “rogue” because that’s probably more accurate here: the word once had a much broader range than it does today, including various kinds of entertainers and other dubious characters. (So one chronicle calls Romulus and the disreputable men he offered citizenship, before that unspeakable Sabine business, harlots.) All this courtesy of the MED, by the by.
As for its “gobelin” citations, most of them are so late that anyone who’s read Spenser should find it a cinch. ;) I am curious about what’s going on in the passage from the Psalms, but I have no patience to cross-reference the Vulgate to whatever the modern numbering is, or to try to find an early Greek version, and I don’t have Hebrew.
Picts are Ugric peoples and not Celts at all - a completely different ethnic group. Though certainly the conquered people theory could be referring to Ugric Picts.
Got any sources for the Ugric Pict theory? All we know of them is place and people names that seem quite Brythonic IIRC... and we have damn little evidence of Finno Ugric populations ever settling West of Finland or the Urals, and the settling of Hungary by Magyars is fairly recent (historical times, late Roman Empire).
No, I think you just pointed to all the known Finno-Ugric settlement areas in Europe. I wish I had a better answer. Their migration period was prehistoric and their are no records beyond that. The book I previously mentioned called The History of Pagan Europe discusses the Finno-Ugric Pict connection (the author of that book was an etymologist, so apparently some place names or personal names are derived from Finno-Ugric as well - I don't know enough beyond that). The Picts, of course, are the mentioned tattooed people of Scotland mentioned by Roman texts.
As an aside, I also learned that wode was not the coloring agent used by the Picts, that made up concept only appears in one pamphlet published by an English lobbyist complaining of the textile industry moving to India in the late 18th century, as an attempt to romanticize that textile coloring agent, and it's false importance to English heritage. Wode is used as a coloring agent in textiles for the color blue. However lab testing has proven that wode does not stick to human skin, and if attempted as a tattoo color, it quickly diffuses under the skin so cannot work as tattoos.
All the recent movies that show Romans fighting the Picts covered in wode is a fallacy and not true. The Picts used something else for the blue tattoos (unknown), not wode, however.
Got any sources for the Ugric Pict theory? All we know of them is place and people names that seem quite Brythonic IIRC... and we have damn little evidence of Finno Ugric populations ever settling West of Finland or the Urals, and the settling of Hungary by Magyars is fairly recent (historical times, late Roman Empire).Picts are Ugric peoples and not Celts at all - a completely different ethnic group. Though certainly the conquered people theory could be referring to Ugric Picts.
Wow, I'm reeling, and about to fall off my chair. I've been wiki'ing my head apart. Like I said, philology was never anything I studied, and much of the jargon and details that wiki wants to throw at us just blurs in front of my eyes. But the key thing seems to be that the Gaels conquered a different kind of Celts when they conquered the Picts, who were (linguistically at least) related to Bretons. For more, gamer-printer, you can take a look at Wiki's Celtic Classifications; I especially recommend linking to "Brittonic" and "Goidelic." And also at Wiki's details re: Pictish. If you scroll down to "Discredited theories," you'll see the Uralic or Ugric idea. The only thing that gives us much comfort is the theory inbetween the two sections, "Pre-Indo-European theory." (In other words, the theory that the Celts might have conquered people not speaking an Indo-European language at all.) It's on the wane now, but who knows? Like I said, all of this is in essence fictional, anyway.
Thanks for the catch, Klorox.
What frustrates me the most, and what kept me searching long after I'd found those obvious sites, was that I couldn't find any discussion of what Picts would have looked like. Were they in fact short & dark-haired, while the invading Scotti were tall & blond? Even if they spoke a similar language, they might have gotten turned into "brownies" in legends, if so. But the only thing I could find (possibly due to never finding the right search terms) was that "modern Celts" (most likely Gaels) are linked to red hair.
People seem to have gotten afraid to discuss appearance in any sort of ethnic context. I understand the cause, of course. But I don't want to kill off or even discriminate against people who look a certain way! I just want to understand how British peoples came to have such a varied set of appearances. And of course, I'm well aware that Germany also has shorter & dark-haired people in the south & east and the more Nordic look in the north & west. How does this relate to languages?????????? AAAARGH.
Well the kingdom of Dal Riata was known to be based in Northern Ireland and across the Irish Sea to the western isles and regions in Southern Scotland, which eventually became the ruling class of Scotland. So these Scots are actually Irish. My grandmother's maiden name is Irwin, which is attested to be Erinveine in its original, which means "western noble" referring to its origins in Ireland. The Kingdom of Strathclyde in southern Scotland, is also a derivative sovereignty sometime after the Dal Riata period, which was ruled by an Erinveine.
@bitter lilly, while the idea that Picts were Ugric has been discounted in recent times, as you say, however the lack of evidence makes all this fictional at best, so claiming its so or it's not is just as fictional - there is no true proof either way. So I don't think one can officially discount the Ugrian possibility without further evidence, which does not exist (so far) - it's all supposition.
I just want to make a paean to Wikipedia.
Yes, it can easily be wrong. Someone thought goblins were listed as the offspring of Cain in Beowulf; chances are that something like goblins in fact are, and the person writing that just wasn't very precise. Maybe nothing like goblins are; the only way to really find out is to read Beowulf -- something I at least have no intention of doing!
But books written for lay audiences are at minimum 20 years behind the times as far as actual scientists in the field are concerned. At minimum. Even fresh-off-the-press, the Encyclopedia Britannica was likely more so. (Back in its only-on-paper days. I don't know how well it's adapted to an age with Wikipedia as competition.) If you're a lay person reading a source, no matter how reputable, that started out 20 years behind then-current theory but is itself 20 years old (or more)...
Wikipedia can be impressively nimble. I'd guess most articles are at most ten years behind cutting-edge academic theory -- and likely less. And it's comprehensive -- the breadth of what it covers is incredible to someone raised on paper encyclopedias.
And the editors seem to do a fairly good job of noticing which articles don't have footnotes or seem to be pure opinion. All they have time to do is to flag them, but at least the reader is warned. As a result, most of the articles really do footnote most statements. Sure, if you really want to build an academically rigorous argument, you've got to dig into those footnotes. At least they're there.
I don't. I'm reading as a lay person, for the fun of a conversation with interested friends. And oh, have I gotten an education in the course of this one! If a few details are mistaken, well, it's still better than vague notions 40 years out of date.
Well the kingdom of Dal Riata was known to be based in Northern Ireland and across the Irish Sea to the western isles and regions in Southern Scotland, which eventually became the ruling class of Scotland. So these Scots are actually Irish. My grandmother's maiden name is Irwin, which is attested to be Erinveine in its original, which means "western noble" referring to its origins in Ireland. The Kingdom of Strathclyde in southern Scotland, is also a derivative sovereignty sometime after the Dal Riata period, which was ruled by an Erinveine.
@bitter lilly, while the idea that Picts were Ugric has been discounted in recent times, as you say, however the lack of evidence makes all this fictional at best, so claiming its so or it's not is just as fictional - there is no true proof either way. So I don't think one can officially discount the Ugrian possibility without further evidence, which does not exist (so far) - it's all supposition.
Yes, the "Scotti" clearly were originally Irish.
There is evidence based on language, is the point. There aren't many written bits from pre-Scotti days, but there are some. And there's other linguistic clues in the way Scottish Gaelic changed. This is philology at its heated best. If everyone has agreed that Uralic languages just don't play into it, then there's no point in mentioning the possibility of such an origin for Picts. IMHO.
Also regarding Wikipedia, there's another site I rely on for all things Samurai, called Samurai Archives. Apparently lots of information from that website was once posted to Wikipedia without permission and the owners of Samurai Archives got in a legal fight with Wikipedia, and had all that information removed from Wikipedia (though you can find it in the link above).
Also regarding Wikipedia, there's another site I rely on for all things Samurai, called Samurai Archives. Apparently lots of information from that website was once posted to Wikipedia without permission and the owners of Samurai Archives got in a legal fight with Wikipedia, and had all that information removed from Wikipedia (though you can find it in the link above).
Thanks for the link! I've bookmarked it.
Do you know approx. what period the Jade Regent history would match?
Qunnessaa, I'll get back to our digression, I promise. I've gotten distracted by the actual game I'm playing in.
And... shopping.
Do you know anything about blaster builds? I'm playing a sorcerer blaster, and looking for some shopping help here.
It's a week later, and I've gotten distracted again... And I have to admit, I'm intimidated by that much Middle English. (From the list of gobelyn quotes.)
But it's been wonderful fun chatting with all of you! And I'll look especially for you, my literature buddy -- Qunnessaa -- and for you, the Japan source & mapper -- gamer-printer -- on other boards! (I've already seen gamer-printer elsewhere.)
Although, I'd still love to find out a rough correlation for Minkai in Jade Regent to Japanese history periods...